Google Chairman Eric Schmidt shares a joke with Hillary

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Clinton during a "casual chat" - a special meeting with company employees at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, July 21, 2014.
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt shares a joke with Hillary Clinton during a "casual chat" - a special meeting with company employees at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California, July 21, 2014.
The stated reason for the meeting was a book. Schmidt was writing a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas. The book was intended to be a guide to Google’s brainstorming methods. I knew little about Cohen at the time.

In fact, Cohen came to Google from the State Department list of lebanon cell phone numbers in 2010. He was a Generation Y [1981–90] government think tank, a technologist who had been in government between two administrations, a courtier of the world of policy think tanks and institutions who had arrived in his early twenties. He rose to become a senior adviser to Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.

In government, working for the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen soon earned the nickname Condi's party-starter, channeling Silicon Valley buzzwords into policy circles and churning out delightful rhetorical nonsense like "Public Diplomacy 2.0." His profile on the Council on Foreign Relations lists his expertise as "Terrorism; radicalization; the impact of 21st-century communications technologies on statecraft; Iran."

It was Cohen, who, while working at the State Department, emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to ask him to delay planned maintenance in order to help facilitate the failed 2009 uprising in Iran. His well-documented love affair with Google began that same year, when he befriended Eric Schmidt in the ruins of Baghdad after the occupation. Just a month later, Schmidt recreated Cohen’s familiar environment within Google, developing an internal “think tank,” locating it in New York City and putting Cohen at its helm. Google Ideas was born.